Brooklyn Castle is an overlong but engaging look at a New York school where disadvantaged
sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders have ruled the roost among America’s chess-playing middle
schools for 20 years.

In her documentary, filmmaker Katie Dellamaggiore introduces us to motivated, talented children
of African and Latin American immigrant families, and native-born kids with an aptitude that the
school is uniquely prepared to develop and exploit. We meet the parents, who are just as engaged in
their children’s futures.

And we are introduced to Ms. Vicary, the teacher-coach, and Mr. Galvin, the assistant principal
and coach — who have turned the “chess nerds” into popular, heroic role models.There are just too
many characters to do justice to what is a chess-playing variation of the
underdog-team-beats-the-odds story to which we’re treated.

There’s gregarious Pobo, the team captain — a great chess player who envisions his career in
politics starting with winning school president. The pragmatic Alexis tries to keep it all in
balance, fretting over a Plan B for his life in case chess glory doesn’t lead to law school.
Rochelle wants to be the first female African-American grandmaster at chess.

The dreadlocked Justus is a prodigy who finds the competition stiffer when he hits middle
school.

And Patrick, the one white kid profiled, sees his climb on the chess ladder as a means of
combating his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: “It helps me concentrate.”

Having so many kids to follow, Dellamaggiore doesn’t delve too deeply into anybody’s life. We
don’t hear about the long-term effect that the middle-school fixation has had on past students and
get only a hint of how active the parents are. But the director never goes far wrong when she just
hangs with the kids, focusing on their focus, capturing their disappointment about losses and the
thrill of each victory.“How’d you get down two pawns?” one boy asks another, comforting him after a
loss.

Even with banners and trophies decorating the halls, even with a documentary showing how cool it
is to have kids challenged and motivated intellectually instead of athletically,
Brooklyn Castle won’t overthrow the tyranny of jocks over geeks in American schools.

But Dellamaggiore does a pretty good job of letting parents, and their kids, dream of that
day.